"Gordon R. Dickson - Enter a Pilgrim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

"..Then it is true. The fault is mine," said the Aalaag son submissively. "I have wasted good cattle."

"It is true good cattle have been wasted," answered his father, "innocent cattle who originally had no intent to
challenge our law. And for that I will pay a fine, because I am your father and it is to my blame that you made
an error. But you will repay me five times over because your error goes deeper than mere waste of good
cattle, alone."

"Deeper, my father?"
Shane kept his head utterly still within the concealing shadow of the hood to his pilgrim’s cloak. The two
could have no suspicion that one of the cattle of Lyt Ahn, Aalaag Governor of All Earth, stood less than a
lance-length from them, able to comprehend each word they spoke. But it would be wise not to attract their
attention. An Aalaag father did not ordinarily reprimand his son in public, or in the hearing of any cattle not in
his household. The heavy voices rumbled on and the blood sand in Shane’s ears.

"Much deeper, my son…"

The sigh of the figure on the blades before him sickened Shane. He had tried to screen it from him with one of
his own private imaginings-the image he had dreamed up of a human outlaw whom no Aalaag could catch or
conquer. A human who went about the world anonymously, like Shane, in pilgrim robes; but, unlike Shane,
exacting vengeance from the aliens for each wrong they did to a man, woman or child. However, in the face of
the bloody reality before Shane on the wall, fantasy had failed. Now, though, out of the corner of his right eye,
he caught sight of something that momentarily blocked that reality from his mind, and sent a thrill of
unreasonable triumph running through him.

Barely four meters or so, beyond and above both him and the riders on the two massive beasts, the sagging
branch of an oak tree pushed its tip almost into the line of vision between Shane’s eyes and the bladed man;
and on the end of branch, among the new green leaves of the year, was a small, cocoon-like shape, already
broken. From it had just recently struggled the still-crumpled shape of a butterfly that did not yet know what
its wings were for.

How it managed to survive through the winter here was beyond guessing. Theoretically, the Aalaag had
exterminated all insects in towns and cities. But here it was; a butterfly of Earth being born even as a man of
Earth was dying-a small life for a large. The utterly disproportionate feeling of triumph sang in Shane. Here
was a life that had escaped the death sentence of the alien and would live in spite of the Aalaag.-that is, if the
two now watching on their great red mounts did not notice it as it waved its wings, drying them for flight.

They must not notice. Unobtrusively, lost in the crowd with his rough gray pilgrim’s cloak and staff,
undistinguished among the other drab humans, Shane drifted right, toward the aliens, until the branch-tip with
its emerging butterfly stood squarely between him and the man on the wall.

It was superstition, magic… call it what you liked, it was the only help he could give the butterfly. The danger
to small life now beginning on the branch-tip should, under any cosmic justice, be insured by the larger life
now ending for the man on the wall. The one should balance out the other. Shane fixed his gaze so that it hid
the further figure of the man on the blades. He bargained with fate. I will not blink, he told himself; and the
butterfly will stay invisible to the Aalaag. They will see only the man…

Beside him, neither of the massive, metal-clad figures had noticed his moving. They were still talking.

"… in battle," the father was saying, "each of us is equal to more than a thousand of such as these. We
would be nothing if not that. But though one be superior to a thousand, it does not follow that the thousand is